Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Dorothy Wickenden: My mother gave me the letters twenty years ago, and said, “These are your grandmother’s letters from Colorado.” I knew the stories well because she had told them to me when I was little. I had wanted to read them one day, but I forgot about them because I was bringing up two children and had a busy job. I stuck them in the back of a drawer. Then one day, in the fall of 2008, I was laid up with a broken ankle for two weeks and I was sitting with my left foot propped up on my desk with a bag of ice over it. I thought, “Time to clean out some old files.” I found a folder way in the back that said “Dorothy Woodruff Letters 1916–1917.” I started reading the first letter, which my grandmother had written right after they arrived in the tiny frontier town of Hayden. It began, “My dearest family, can you believe I’m actually out here in Colorado?” It was very far away from where she had grown up in New York, and I was pulled in immediately. She wrote those letters when she was twenty-nine years old. Even though her voice was totally familiar to me, I was reading them as a middle-aged editor, and I knew from the first page that this was a great piece of writing and an amazing story. I sat down and I read them all. And later I came to David [Remnick] and said, “You know, I have this story about my grandmother. Do you think we can do something about it in the New Yorker?”

  DR: How well did you know your grandmother? What was the familiarity you had from life rather than from found objects and letters?

  DW: She died after I graduated from college. She was ninety-three. She lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I lived in Weston, Connecticut. She’d visit us a couple of times a year, and it was always a great event. She was tiny, four foot eleven, a little lady with white hair, but a complete powerhouse. She had an unbelievably dynamic character. Somewhat Victorian, but with a spirit of independence and can-do. She was always a wonderful storyteller, but I didn’t realize quite how good she was until I read the letters.

  DR: What did you see in the letters? What did they suggest in terms of a story? Finding letters in drawers is the way any number of novelists might begin their narrative.

  DW: My grandmother and her friend Rosamond had grown up in a very wealthy industrial city in midstate New York. They were brought up as proper young ladies. They went to Smith College at a time when few girls had any kind of higher education. Afterward, they were expected to return to Auburn to marry. They didn’t want to do that.

  DR: Why not?

  DW: They were somewhat contemptuous of the young men they met. When I was in college, I went to visit her. “Dorothy, dear,” she said, “do you have a beau?” That was the word she used. And I said, “No, I haven’t really met anybody interesting yet.” And she said, “Well, as you’ll discover, most men are terribly stupid.” My cousin was in the car, and she hastily added, “Oh, not your father. Not your uncle.”

  There was a very prestigious seminary in Auburn—the Auburn Theological Seminary—where a lot of the young women found their husbands. My grandmother and Ros just thought they were too effete and really not worth considering. So, they graduated from Smith, went back home, and did not marry. Then they convinced Rosamond’s parents to take them to Europe for a year and they went on an extremely lavish trip.

  DR: The Grand Tour.

  DW: The Grand Tour.

  DR: So, they were like Henry James characters.

  DW: Totally like Henry James characters, and they did the whole thing, went to about six countries, ended up in Paris. In 1910. At the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. On their own because their parents had gone home. They had the time of their lives. They went to the opera every other night. They went to see Isadora Duncan dance when she was at the beginning of her career. They saw Nijinsky dance in Scheherazade. My grandmother wrote a letter home almost every day to someone in her family. She had six siblings. And she wrote different kinds of letters to each one, depending on what his or her interests were.

  DR: All of these letters became available to you?

  DW: Yes, later on, after I finished the New Yorker piece. I hadn’t even known about the Europe letters.

  DR: In Henry James, the woman of means goes east—Isabel Archer. All the great heroines—they go to Paris, they go to London. Your grandmother and Rosamond go west. How did that happen and why? That’s your story—go west, young girl.

  DW: That’s the story. They got back after this unbelievably wonderful trip to Europe. And not surprisingly, they were bored by the constricting rituals of Auburn society. Ten-course luncheons, charity balls, bridge—for six long years.

  DR: They didn’t want to go to the big city?

  DW: They did go to New York one year, where, once again, their parents expected them to meet somebody eligible. Ros was very beautiful—tall and willowy, with thick brown hair. Men kept falling in love with her.

  DR: And she was not interested?

  DW: There was one very persistent young man in New York. He was in shipping. But my grandmother made it clear that he was not up to Rosamond’s standards. She described him as a “regular Miss Nancy,” and said, “Needless to say, Rosamond wasn’t interested.”

  So, they were in Auburn, bored out of their minds. They were feminists, and they were in the heart of suffrage country. The women who initiated the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 lived in Auburn. Dorothy and Ros went out and stood on soapboxes—literally—and advocated women’s rights. As my grandmother put it, “My parents thought this was absurd. We were in this troubled state of mind when an unusual opportunity presented itself.”

  Rosamond had tea with an acquaintance, a graduate of Wellesley, who’d just gotten back from visiting a friend whose brother ended up being the hero of my book: Ferry Carpenter. Ferry was a young lawyer and homesteader on the Western Slope of Colorado, which was still mostly unsettled. He and his neighbors had just built a beautiful stone schoolhouse in the mountains for the children of homesteaders, and he was looking for two cultivated young teachers from the East. Ferry went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, and Ros immediately perked up. She rushed to the telephone: “Dotty, we must talk about this. We’ve got to go out and teach school in Colorado.” My grandmother, who lived around the corner, ran over. They instantly decided, yes, we’re going to do this.

  DR: But this is crazy. Colorado in those days is the other side of the moon!

  DW: Yes, and they knew very little about the West. And they knew, as my grandmother admitted, absolutely nothing about teaching.

  DR: In what spirit did they go there? To do good? For an adventure? In the spirit of Teach For America?

  DW: It was the beginning of the Progressive Era. They were brought up with the sense that you should do good for others. And they also thought it sounded like a lark. They applied impulsively and, to their amazement, they got hired. Then, my grandmother said, “We realized what we had done. We didn’t know anything about teaching, and we began to be very frightened.”

  DR: At what point did they realize that Carpenter had a motive?

  DW: This became the comic crux of the book. Ferry was a visionary. He really had an earnest desire to educate the children of these homesteaders. He had high ideals, which he conveyed in the letters he wrote to them. But he didn’t tell them he had an ulterior motive. He lived up in Elkhead, which was a settlement of about twenty-five people. There were no single young women, and the cowboys were lonely and asking Ferry for help. So he decided to build this schoolhouse, and then use it as a lure for cultivated, pretty young women from the East. The idea was that a few teachers would come out every year or two, an ongoing source of marriageable women for all the young cowboys.

  DR: You had to work with big themes about women, feminist history, expansion westward, otherness in America. Sometimes you read a family story and it’s just itself.

  DW: Sometimes when you’re doing a research project like this, everything just falls into place. People began giving me things. My aunt and my mother were librarians, so they had kept all the photographs and letters. My grandmother had said that her grandfat
her lived next door to William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state. When I went to Auburn, and to the Seward Museum, and I asked the executive director whether she remembered correctly. “Oh, yes!” he said. He pointed out the library window at the municipal parking lot. “Harmon Woodruff. He lived right there and his children played with Seward’s children.”

  Auburn was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and Seward hid slaves in his basement. Some of these big themes of American history had just preceded my grandmother’s time. Dorothy and Rosamond learned their history through their relatives, who would tell stories about their neighbors. After the Civil War, Seward had helped Harriet Tubman buy a house down the street. When my grandmother was three or four, she’d see Tubman, an elderly woman, riding her bicycle up and down South Street, stopping to ask for food donations for her home for elderly African-Americans. I got the personal side and the bigger backdrop, and I tried to meld the two.

  DR: You go from archive to letter drawer to museum and, like a reporter, like a historian, you’re building a base of information. And then you get to the writer part and it has to have an architecture.

  DW: One of the great things about my job is that I work with some of the best writers in the world. I watch how great narratives are written. But I defied one of my own rules. I almost always tell writers who get tangled up in their narratives: Just tell it chronologically. If you try these fancy moves, they can be a disaster. So I wasn’t sure about the flashbacks. The trick was how to do them, and do the bigger panorama of American history, without losing sight of my main characters.

  DR: Your mother is very much alive. And, I presume she read this book. Was it revelatory to her? Did she know everything?

  DW: She knew most of it because one of the things she did as a devoted daughter and librarian was transcribe every letter—which made my job much easier. She knew the stories anyway because her mother had told them to her over and over again when she was growing up. But she didn’t know all the history of Auburn. She didn’t know the early history of Denver. I spent part of one chapter on the building of the railroad that the heroines took over the Continental Divide. The railroad was only three years old. It was a four-car train on a winding track that went all the way up and over the Continental Divide. My grandmother said in her letter, “This is a miracle of engineering. I don’t know how they ever did it.” And I thought, “I wonder how they did do it.” I did some reading and research and I found an expert on the building of this railway. It was an incredible story. So I was telling the story of Dorothy and Ros on the train, and I stopped and had a little interlude on the history of the railroad, and then I came back to them when they got to the top of the mountain.

  DR: How did it make you feel differently about America? It seems to me that this is a real American story and these two women both embody and bump into a lot of large American themes.

  DW: I found the writing really liberating. You and I spend so much of our days thinking about all the horrors of the twenty-first century—the floods, and the tsunamis, global warming, and the wars. My grandmother’s story was an escape to a simpler time. It was also a very idealistic time.

  I also loved my characters and what they said about America. It was right before World War I. Most of these people had no experience of war. They hadn’t experienced the Civil War. So these aristocrats from Auburn and these dirt-poor homesteaders all shared the idea that America was the greatest country in the world. They thought they were going to build something really extraordinary on, of all places, a remote mountaintop. They were going to build a school, which, to the homesteaders, symbolized America and moving beyond who they were and where they had come from.

  The ending wasn’t particularly happy, but the fourteen-year-old son of the homesteaders they lived with would go out every morning and break the trail for them. They could never have found their way to the schoolhouse on their own. It was three miles. I found his daughter and grandson. His grandson said, “My grandfather, Lewis, talked about your grandmother with such admiration. He always made me feel that education is the most important thing in your life.” Lewis went to college on a scholarship funded by Ferry Carpenter and Rosamond’s mother; he went to graduate school and became the chief forester for the state of Missouri. It’s a great American success story. That year changed his life just as it changed my grandmother’s life and Ros’s life. Both women said that for all of the wonderful things that had been bestowed upon them, this was by far the best year of their lives.

  © REX BONOMELLI

  DOROTHY WICKENDEN has been the executive editor of the New Yorker since 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. She is on the faculty of The Writers’ Institute at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where she teaches a course on narrative nonfiction. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Westchester, New York.

  Dorothy Wickenden and Ferry Carpenter, August 1973

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  COVER DESIGN BY REX BONOMELLI • FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: TOP, ROSAMOND UNDERWOOD AND DOROTHY WOODRUFF, CANNES, 1911; BOTTOM, DOROTHY AND ROSAMOND, ELKHEAD, 1916. BACK COVER PHOTOGRAPH: THE SCHOOLHOUSE

  NOTES

  Much of Nothing Daunted is based on approximately one hundred letters written by Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, starting in 1897 and ending in 1973. Dorothy wrote forty letters home from Europe in 1910–11, which became the foundation of Chapter 6. From July 1916 to February 1917, together they sent fifty long letters to their families from Elkhead. I was extraordinarily lucky to have two such engaging and trustworthy correspondents.

  Virtually all quotations from Dorothy’s letters are from the Dorothy Woodruff Hillman Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Quotations from Rosamond’s letters, from Grace Underwood’s papers and diary, and from Ruth Carpenter Woodley’s and Miriam Heermans’s letters are courtesy of the Perry and Cosel families. Quotations from Lewis Harrison’s unpublished memoir about his parents, Uriah and Mary Harrison, are thanks to Lewis’s daughter, Jane Harrison Telder, and his great-niece, Linda Harrison Williamson. I have retained their spelling, punctuation, and peculiarities of style.

  I drew as well from Dorothy’s oral histories about her years growing up in Auburn and her nine months in Elkhead. Both were taped and transcribed in Weston, Connecticut, in the early 1980s by my mother. The transcripts are in the Sophia Smith Collection. On May 15, 1973, Rosamond’s friend Eleanor Bliss interviewed her at the Carpenter Ranch about her experience in Elkhead. That oral history is in the collection of the Tread of Pioneers Museum in Steamboat Springs.

  Bob Perry’s kidnapping was reported in papers across the country and in the Routt County Sentinel, the Routt County Republican, the Oak Creek Times, the Rocky Mountain News, the Yampa Leader, the Denver Times, and the Denver Post. Most of Colorado’s early newspapers are available online, at the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.

  Ferry Carpenter’s papers are scattered. His family and mine have some of his letters. Tapes and CDs of his talks and reminiscences are in the Denver Public Library’s Western History collection; the Colorado Historical Society in Denver; and the Tread of Pioneers Museum. Ferry’s letters to Henry Bragdon, one of Woodrow Wilson’s biographers, and notes about Ferry’s recollections of Woodrow Wilson (which he used when writing his autobiography, Confessions of a Maverick) are in the Princeton University Library. The Huntington Library, which contains the papers of Frederick Jackson Turner, has three letters that Ferry wrote to Turner between 1913 and 1926.

  CHAPTER 1: OVERLAND JOURNEY

  One chronicler observed, “Prick South Street at one end”: Chamberlain, 28.

  They also reread the letter: July 18, 1916.

  there were few signs of l
ife: Greeley, “The American Desert,” in An Overland Journey, June 2, 1859.

  Ros signed the register: Guest Register # 78, July 26, 1916.

  On a day: Hunt, 24.

  Modeled after the Campanile: Interview with Debra Faulkner, historian, Brown Palace Hotel, July 20, 2009.

  In his first day’s edition: Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859.

  “the new El Dorado”: Barney, 17.

  Denver City became an indispensable: Imagine a Great City: Denver at 150, exhibition, November 22, 2008–Winter 2010, Colorado Historical Society, Denver, CO.

  he reported on June 20, “we have tidings”: “Gold in the Rocky Mountains,” in An Overland Journey.

  A month earlier, a man from Illinois, Daniel Blue: Blue was saved by an Arapaho who carried him to his lodge, fed him, and took him to the nearest stagecoach stop. The story was also reported by Henry Villard, “To the Pike’s Peak Country in 1859 and Cannibalism on the Smoky Hill Route,” Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 17, 1879, in Grinstead and Fogelberg, 9–11. Libeus Barney provided a fuller account, with some particularly lurid flourishes, 24–25.

  One entrepreneur with grandiose ideas: William J. Baker, “Brown’s Bluff,” Empire Magazine, December 28, 1958; “The Palace Henry Brown Built,” Rocky Mountain News, April 22, 1984.

  The project took four years and cost $2 million: Hunt, 34.

  the Brown Palace already had been sandblasted: Interview with Faulkner, July 20, 2009.

  an 1880 tourists’ guide called it “an unknown land.” Denver society referred to it as “the wild country”: Duane A. Smith, “A Land Unto Itself: The Western Slope,” in Grinstead and Fogelberg, 135–46.